How to Use Refilling Warehouses to Automate Replenishment

Today, I want to do a quick walk though of Refilling warehouses. Many companies will use a mechanism such as a supermarket or main stocking warehouse, as well as lineside production or picking warehouses that need to be replenished. There may not be enough physical space in these locations or material may not need to be there until it is ready to be used, so warehouses will purchase and stock material in one warehouse and transfer it to the other. Refilling warehouses can help automate the generation of that transfer based on demand. This post won’t talk about other replenishment strategies such as those used in Advanced warehousing, but will show the basic Master planning refilling automation.

You start with your warehouse that needs to be replenished. One the Master Planning fasttab, you select “Refilling warehouse.” This means that when there is demand for items in that warehouse, from a sales order, production order, safety stock, etc., that a planned transfer order will be raised to get the material from another warehouse rather than generating a planned purchase or production order since you already made or bought it, it’s just located elsewhere. The warehouse that refills it is called the Main warehouse:

In the example above, this shows a rule for Warehouse 11 to supply Warehouse 12. So if there is demand for an item in Warehouse 12 and not enough inventory on-hand or on an open transfer, a planned transfer order will be generated to let the warehouse know to pick the material required and send to Warehouse 12. This alleviates the need to manually create transfers or alert personnel through unnecessary phone calls or emails. And as I’m sure you already know, transfer orders support picking activities just like sales orders.

One quick thing to note is that the above rule applies for the entire warehouse. If the transfer rule applies only to specific items, that’s where you want to specify planned order types per warehouse in the Item coverage of that product.

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